It's Alive!!!! Why is it getting Faster?

In my life time I have never seen a PC get faster over time without doing some sort of tweaks. But we had some friends over tonight and did a demo of our HDX9000 Dragon. Our Dragon has just done the impossible. It has gotton faster. Why? Did it fix itself? I'm Not Complaining....


We noticed 2 interesting things.

1 - Everytime we booted the PC. It would boot very fast to the Vista Desktop. But once their we would get very heavy CPU usage and the Hard Drive Light would always be on for about 4 minutes. I was told By HPIT that this was normal and it had something to do with a service called Superfetch which makes the PC programs start faster. I should not deactivate this service. HPIT refused to tell me how to deactivate. So we left it alone.
I'm so glad we left it turned on.
Well, tonight we just turned on the Dragon and the darn thing booted so fast and was up and running to the desktop and the Hard drive light was on solid for only about 10 seconds and CPU only peaked for about 1 second.
From what I understand from reading threads here and from HPIT is. It may take a number of Boots for Prefetch to learn what applications you use and builds some sort of Cache that should never be deleted. Otherwise you will once again have go though that large amount of disk activity.
Once again learned something New. I bet lots of people turned superfetch off and this is why they complain about Vista Being slow and has lots of Disk Activity. IMOP, I think Microsoft should put in Big print someplace to not disable Superfetch. This service will take care of itself after about a week or so if you Boot the machine I guess several times. I wonder How many times you have to boot? For this to operate correctly. Maybe once the Cache fills up and Superfetch starts to swap out files. It knows the file cache is full and no longer tries to read masive files from the hard drive at startup. Just guessing.

2 - Now for the second Speed Up.

We ran another WEI Scan.
The Memory has now Gone to 5.1 instead of 5 Bring the WEI to 5.1.

The only thing we did. Besides seting the Quickplay Services to Automatic (Delayed start) was install 3 more Microsoft secuity Updates. I think one had to do with Net Framework security. But I don't see how that could have speeded up memory. We ran the scan twice with the same results.
Who knows maybe after a month. The memory settled into the slots better.

In anycase. It looks like to us that. These HP notebooks get better with age or the more times they are booted.

All these years. I've been buying Dell and others. I'm so glad we bought the HP Dragon instead of the AlienWare HTPC.

 

1. Vista learns user habits, gets progressively faster within the first few days.
2. The WEI score doesn't mean anything.

 

really?
how does leaning habits make computer boot faster?

 

I do not know what specifically Vista does, if anything, but an easy 'learning' habit that would affect boot speed would deal with how much is preloaded vs. loaded when needed. For instance an OS could simply load everything it expects an average user to need and then overtime keep a small database of what is actually used and how long after boot it's needed. Then it could easily skip those components that are rarely used, thus resulting in shorter load times. Individual components could also track usage patterns and lazy initialize their data accordingly.

Other tricks that could affect boot time would be organizing the data on the hard disk so that data is read sequentially with minimal seeking. This too could be optimized by analyzing usage patterns.

Of course Vista may do neither of these and have it's own methods for optimizing load times, these are just two quick ideas off the top of my head.

 

Vista learns to irritate users... more n more problems with SP1 RC...

 

Simple answer really...

"SuperFetch keeps track of which applications you use most and loads this information in RAM so that programs load faster than they would if the hard disk had to be accessed every time. Windows SuperFetch prioritizes the programs you're currently using over background tasks and adapts to the way you work by tracking the programs you use most often and pre-loading these into memory. With SuperFetch, background tasks still run when the computer is idle. However, when the background task is finished, SuperFetch repopulates system memory with the data you were working with before the background task ran. Now, when you return to your desk, your programs will continue to run as efficiently as they did before you left. It is even smart enough to know what day it is in the event you use different applications more often on certain days."

and it is from here:

http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2007/03/29/windows-vista-superfetch-readyboost.aspx

 

Thanks for the Link.

We were just wondering what Superfetch has to do with if anything the Hard Disk not running anymore at 100 percent at bootup as it did the first couple of weeks or I guess maybe around 10 starts?

 

The reason for this is entirely to do with the System restore setup. There are times, scheduled and unscheduled, that the computer will make a new restore point, exactly at the timings as you describe. You will find now that this occurs on system changes or sporadically when you start it.

This can be adjusted. If you check out my tweaking guide, you will see that performance can be drastically improved and hd space regained by turning system restore off. I suggest in cases of this, like I who has Vista Ultimate, you make occasional complete system backups or, if not, regular 'Easy Transfer' or backup sets.

 

Thanks. I'll do that. We were planning on making a full backup tonight since everything is working great.

 

Vista does indeed get faster, but a difference from 4 minutes to 10 seconds is very hard to believe. Are you sure the second test it was not resuming from sleep mode instead of doing a full reboot? Resuming from sleep mode is very fast and will act how you describe.

 

The difference doesnt reflect anything but hard disk access time. More specifically, he was timing how long the background disk activity was before in comparison to the way it is now.

This, in itself, does not reflect Vista speed or it getting faster, but rather, a performance increase in general operations as the background activity has reduced.

 

Sorry maybe I didn't explain it clearly but flamenko has it correct anyway.

This is direct from bootup. Not from sleep.

When we 1st turned on the computer and got to the desktop.
The hard drive light would stay solid for 3 or 4 minutes. No flickering or anything. Just solid on like the power light When we went to the performance graphs. They showed both the Harddrive and CPU's running close to 100 percent for that time.
It continued to do this. So we got woried and called HPIT. They told us it was superfetch and this was normal.
So last night when I was waiting to answer the question why the drive light was on for a long time. It never happend. when it got to the desktop. It blinked a couple of times then came on solid for about 10 seconds and then started flashing but never came on solid again and same thing happend this morning. Even with restore left on.
So this kind of made me think. Superfetch finished it's thing and the only thing now making the hard drive light stay on for those 10 or so seconds is the restore point creation.

Anyways from the way flamenko descripes the answer. I think it's a combination of both restore and superfetch. That made this act this way.


Now i"m not going to have 4 minutes to get my cup of tea Hee Hee.

Thanks

 

I've had a similiar experience with my Pavilion 9500t.
I am actually into finding and applying the lastest tweeks but my laptop always took a while to boot up. I've had it for a few months and all of the sudden a few weeks ago it started booting very quickly. Never timed it but it has to be a difference measured in minutes. Didn't really do anything different...been running the same defrag programs and utility programs that I was before. Anyway it's a nice improvement the boot times always use to bug me a little and now its great!